Shari Randall's"Pets" will be included in Chesapeake Crimes: Fur, Feathers, and Felonies anthology, which will be published in 2018. In the same anthology "Rasputin," KM Rockwood'sshort story, will also bepublished. Her short story "Goldie" will be published in the Busted anthology, which will be released by Level Best Books on April 25th.

Shari Randall's second Lobster Shack Mystery, Against the Claw, will be available in August, 2018.

In addition, our prolific KMhas had the following shorts published as well: "Making Tracks" in Passport to Murder, Bouchercon anthology, October 2017 and "Turkey Underfoot," appears in the anthology The Killer Wore Cranberry: A Fifth Course of Chaos.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

When Absurdity Becomes Reality by Maren Bradley Anderson

In 2008, I was trying to write my first
novel. I wanted to write something funny and absurd, so I based my book on
Aristophanes’s sex-strike play, The
Lysistrata. When I was done, I thought I had written an off-the-wall novel
about sex and politics, but to my surprise, the crazy presidential race I
imagined in 2008 seemed, well, not so crazy in 2016.

The literary theorist in me makes the
distinction between an absurdist story (like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) and absurd humor (like Monty Python’s Flying Circus). My novel Closing the Store is not a bleak story where
characters try to cope with existential crises by endlessly flipping coins. Rather,
it is a novel in which women try to attain world peace with a strip tease.

While I was writing the book, though, I
wasn’t interested in whether it would be more Kafka-esque or Python-ian. I was simply
having fun. Writing something with an absurd premise allowed me to use the
tropes, stereotypes, and memes that made me happy. Since I was writing for my
own enjoyment, I actually finished the book. But I never thought anyone would
read it.

Fast forward eight years. In the winter of
2016, I was amazed by how weird the presidential election was becoming, so I
offered my silly political novel to my publisher who published it. As the campaign progressed, actual presidential
candidates began behaving more and more like my absurd characters. Naturally,
none of us knew that the election would turn out the way it did, but now my
absurd book feels damn near prescient.

This brings me to the other supposedly absurd
part of my book: whole sex strike thing. Aristophanes was pretty plain that,
while the tactic worked in his play, he didn’t think a sex strike could
actually be pulled off. His other plays contained truly absurd elements like
talking frogs and ladders to the clouds.

However, in my lifetime there have been many
sex and women’s strikes that worked. Notably, in 1975, 90% of women in Iceland
went on strike (that is, they did no work, including housework or caring for
children) to protest inequality. In 2003, women in Liberia held a sex strike (that
is, rebellious celibacy) that helped rid the country of Charles Taylor. In 2016,
Polish there was a women’s strike to protest a proposed total abortion ban. And
the day after President Trump’s inauguration, 4 million women around the world marched
to protest his election. I guess we don’t know if that last one has “worked”
yet.

It blows my mind that both the political and
the sex-strike parts of Closing the Store
have gone from truly absurd to nearing normality in the span of eight years. It
makes me wonder what Aristophanes might think. Perhaps he’d say that we are in
for a spate of talking frogs.

Bio:

Maren Bradley
Anderson is a writer, teacher and alpaca rancher in Oregon. She teaches
English at Western Oregon University and novel writing to new authors. She
fills her days caring for alpacas, playing with her kids, and reading books
that make her laugh. She has written two plays for the Apple Box Children’s
Theater, and her poetry has appeared in The
Timberline Review. Her novels Fuzzy
Logic and Closing the Store are
available online and through your local bookstore—just ask them to order them
for you.